A new heart for the West End district, improved transport links, and the construction of an ‘urban village’ of 3000 units in Scotswood: an ambitious plan. Too ambitious, said the Deputy Prime Minister’s Office, which was to provide a significant part of the necessary funding. A new regional spatial planning policy also got in the way. So it’s back to the drawing board. A major setback?

Not according to Project Manager Rob Moore (Newcastle City Council): "Of course, we were disappointed. Adjusting our plans has caused a further delay of eighteen months. But now we have formulated a new approach that has been approved by the City Council. Urban regeneration will continue, but in a more evolutionary way. And the years to come will be exciting; until now we’ve been making the case, now we have to deliver."

Get the governance right
No regrets, then? Rob admits there are some: "Well, we’ve learned that, in urban regeneration, you have to get the governance of the project right. Developing a strategy is relatively easy, but without ownership by all the parties needed to deliver a plan, you’re nowhere. You need good management, a sense of partnership, a clear division of responsibilities, but also a shared responsibility. Between all levels: between the public and the private sector, between the Council and the communities, and between the local and the regional levels. That’s what we learned, the hard way. For instance, we’re trying to get the housebuilders’ associations on board now, before developing our plans further."

Plan discarded, but work continues
Fortunately, restructuring activity in the West End district is already in full swing. If everything had to wait for project approval and execution, there would not much be left to restructure.
On the basis of surveys, it was decided (together with the residents) which streets would be sustainable and which would have to be demolished. In Scotswood, for instance, some 1800 houses are being demolished, about half of the total stock in 1999. The houses left are being refurbished. Rob is upbeat: "We are seeing some positive effects already: the retained houses are becoming more popular: prices are rising already in the West End. The Council is being seen to be dealing with the problem, and this increases confidence, not just in Scotswood itself, but in the adjoining areas as well.
"Some 900 households have been relocated in the past three years, a process which has been difficult and expensive. There is a special team that deals with relocation on a one-to-one basis. Innovative financial arrangements have been developed to help home-owners who were trapped by negative equity, and we’ve started a process of re-involving the community. That is a precondition for successful urban regeneration."

Resident participation
How did the Council actually involve the community? Rob tells the story: "To tell the truth, at first we didn’t. We had the impression that everybody was fed up with consultation about preliminary studies. Residents said: ‘We want to look at something real which we can discuss’. But when the plan to consider large-scale demolition became public, we had a huge PR problem. Residents interpreted the plans as: the Council is going to demolish 2600 houses and didn’t even consult us. So they started campaigning. But the grounds for demolition were strong. The Council had invested £10-15 million in housing maintenance over 10 years, but voids and turnover were still increasing and the condition of the housing was deteriorating. So we sat down together and worked out a demolition plan. That was not a comfortable situation for the residents: talking about demolishing your neighbours’ homes.
"For a couple of years, we have been working together in the Scotswood Joint Working Group, consisting of local residents, a local councillor and council officers. The group meets every month. We even visited other projects in Britain and Sweden that are relevant to our situation.
"So whereas residents were organising protest rallies against our original ideas four years ago, now they say: ‘Get on with it’. The last couple of years, we’ve managed to keep together."

Robust analysis required
Besides getting the governance right, Rob Moore has drawn two other lessons from the project so far. First: provide a robust analysis. Rob explains: "We use a ‘vitality index’, which indicates how well communities function and provides information about crime, income, house prices, health, education attainment and school attendance. We monitor all these indicators in 140 separate neighbourhoods in Newcastle. Which is fine to monitor how effective your policies are. But our analysis was initially comparative: borough A is doing well, borough B is doing badly, so we focus our money and energy on neighbourhood B. We should have put more effort into identifying both the drivers of decline and the drivers of improvement, and address those. Why is borough A losing more population than B? You need a robust analysis to be able to convince policymakers, investors and the residents."

Mind the (quality) gap
The last lesson Rob learnt was about quality: "I believe a quality threshold exists. The usual practice in the last 30 years was to build housing below the quality threshold. It started losing value gradually, until refurbishing became necessary. But the refurbishing investment was also below the quality threshold. The housing lost value again, until a final investment was made: demolition. A lot of money was lost. If, in the beginning, our investment had exceeded the quality threshold, housing value would have increased instead. We would have had higher-quality housing, and it would have been cheaper too."